Word: planetarium
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...great dark vault beneath the dome of New York City's Hayden Planetarium is thick with silence. Schoolchildren who a moment ago were babbling and twitching like a flock of noisy starlings now sit jammed in their seats, motionless, their young eyes straining to see. Suddenly the ebony hemisphere above them gleams with fire: the planets, their satellites and some 4,000 stars begin marching across the heavens toward day break. The audience sucks in its breath. A child grabs the arm of the teacher next to her as she stares at the sky. For it really seems that...
...star of stars, a broad tail of light drops from the sky through the rough timbers of the broken-down stable. It illuminates Mary and the Babe. A child in the audience slides out of her chair and drops to her knees. The lights go up, and the Hayden Planetarium's 44th annual holiday show is over...
Mark Chartrand, the owlish chairman of the Hayden Planetarium, is happy to unmask the manipulative strings attached to this particular wizard, a machine resembling a fat steel dumbbell, a monster with 9,000 eyes that moves eerily above the darkened floor of the planetarium. Explains Chartrand: "The machine moves the sun across the sky and accurately reproduces the movements both of the stars and the planets. In a sense it is a machine that can virtually take you any place in any time." The big steel dumbbell is a German-made Zeiss planetarium projector, 12 ft. high weighing...
Often as not, the men who hold the stars in their places are Jon Bell, an intern studying to be a planetarium director, and Joe Doti, engineer. Except for the subdued glow from green and red console lights, they work in darkness. "It only takes a few weeks to learn how to operate, but you must know the basics of astronomy," says Bell. He is whispering as the display goes on, and his tone suggests an acolyte trying not to disturb a service. Every time he does a show, he admits, he feels a shiver synapsing down his spine...
Scientists are not the only ones smitten by black-hole fever. The parcels of nothingness are a favorite topic on the lecture circuit. They bring out record crowds for planetarium shows, and they have lately been the theme of a spate of books. In the popular lexicon, the term black hole once suggested only the legendary hellish cell in Calcutta in which British prisoners were held by an 18th century Indian nawab. Now it has become an immediately recognizable catchword for a different kind of darkness. Says one young astrophysicist...